Beckman Center

Genentech

In the fall of 1980 Genentech, Inc., a little-known California genetic engineering company, became the overnight darling of Wall Street, raising over $38 million in its initial public stock offering. Lacking marketed products or substantial profit, the firm nonetheless saw its share price escalate from $35 to $89 in the first few minutes of trading, at that point the largest gain in stock-market history. Coming at a time of economic recession and declining technological competitiveness in the United States, the event provoked banner headlines and ignited a period of speculative frenzy over biotechnology as a revolutionary means for creating new and better kinds of pharmaceuticals, untold profit, and a possible solution to national economic malaise.

“Smith Hughes is one of the foremost oral historians of science today, and Genentech is filled with illuminating interview snippets woven artfully into a narrative that both engages and (somewhat surreptitiously) analyzes.”—Cyrus C. M. Mody, Rice University, Bulletin of the History of Medicine

Drawing from an unparalleled collection of interviews with early biotech players, Sally Smith Hughes offers the first book-length history of this pioneering company, depicting Genentech’s improbable creation, precarious youth, and ascent to immense prosperity. Hughes provides intimate portraits of the people significant to Genentech’s science and business, including cofounders Herbert Boyer and Robert Swanson, and in doing so sheds new light on how personality affects the growth of science. By placing Genentech’s founders, followers, opponents, victims, and beneficiaries in context, Hughes also demonstrates how science interacts with commercial and legal interests and university research, and with government regulation, venture capital, and commercial profits.

Integrating the scientific, the corporate, the contextual, and the personal, Genentech tells the story of biotechnology as it is not often told, as a risky and improbable entrepreneurial venture that had to overcome a number of powerful forces working against it.

About the Author

Sally Smith Hughes is an academic specialist in history of science in the Regional Oral History Office at the Bancroft Library. She has conducted close to 150 archival quality oral histories for the Program in Bioscience and Biotechnology Studies, which she directs and which reflects the areas of her research interests. Along with Genentech, she is the author of The Virus: A History of the Concept (Heinemann, 1977) and “Making Dollars out of DNA: The First Major Patent in Biotechnology and the Commercialization of Molecular Biology, 1974–1980” (Isis, 2001).

“Sally Smith Hughes has brought to life the details of what the key players were up to—they weren’t playing it safe, and they created a catalytic environment that generated a whole new industry.”—Cynthia Robbins-Roth, author of From Alchemy to IPO